Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic ArtHyde, Walter Woodburn
History
Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art
Hyde, Walter Woodburn
Olympics; Sculpture, Greek; Sports -- Greece
The greatest artists—architects, painters, and sculptors—of all times
have taught and practised the doctrine that certain proportions are
beautiful, _e. g._, the proportion of the height of the head or the
length of the foot to the whole body, or the length of parts of
the head or body to other parts. In modern times we have only to
mention such names as those of da Vinci, Duerer, Raphael Mengs, and
Flaxman.[595] In Greek days there were many artists who formulated
such canons of proportions. Greek sculptors followed ratios of
proportions so closely that we have statues of various schools, which
are distinguished by fixed proportions of parts, such as the Old Attic,
Old Argive, Polykleitan, Argive-Sikyonian or Lysippan, etc. Some of
these schools used the foot as the common measure, while others used
the palm, finger, or other member.[596] The earliest works on Greek
art were treatises, now lost, by artists in which they worked out
their theories of the principles underlying the proportions of the
human figure.[597] We shall briefly consider a few of these canons,
together with the usual pose of body which conformed with them. The
earliest Peloponnesian canon, which we can analyze, was that followed
by Hagelaïdas of Argos and his school, a canon which was still used in
the Polykleitan circle. Here the weight of the body rested upon the
left leg, while the right one was slightly bent at the knee, its foot
resting flat on the ground; the right arm hung by the side and the left
was usually in action, and the head was slightly inclined to the left
side; the shoulders were extraordinarily broad in comparison with the
hips, the right one being slightly raised. These qualities produced a
short stocky figure, firmly placed.[598] In the middle of the fifth
century B. C., Polykleitos worked out a theory of proportions in the
form of a commentary on his famous statue known as the _Doryphoros_.
This canon was characterized by squareness and massiveness of build.
The weight of the body generally rested on the right foot, while
the left was drawn back, its foot touching the ground with the ball
only. Sometimes this pose was reversed, the left foot carrying the
body-weight, as in the three bases of statues by the master found
at Olympia (_i. e._, those of the athletes Pythokles, Aristion,
and Kyniskos, to be discussed later), and in the works of some of
his pupils, notably in those of Naukydes, Daidalos, and Kleon.[599]
Euphranor, who flourished, according to Pliny, in Ol. 104 (= 364-361 B.
C.), and wrote works on symmetry and color, was the “first” to master
the theory of symmetry.[600] Pliny, however, found his bodies too
slender and his heads and limbs too large, a criticism of his painting
which must have been equally applicable to his sculpture. His canon
did not make much headway, as the majority of sculptors in his century
were still under the domination of the canon of Polykleitos. It was
left for Lysippos, in the second half of the fourth century B.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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